Divinia
Disrupting the E-Commerce Search Market

The biggest influencer in e-commerce search might just be a few miles from Google’s HQ in CA and a short plane ride from Amazon’s juggernaut in Seattle, WA. Located in the Silicon Valley, Divinia Founder and CEO Ji Fang has spent the last four years creating a line-up of products to improve (and disrupt) the e-commerce search market. In 2021, the e-commerce search market was valued at $15.4B in ad spending and is projected to grow to $24B by 2023. A formidable space for any startup, it is dominated by global brands such as Amazon and Walmart, which make up the bulk of search ad spenders.

This tidal wave of spending to court consumers makes perfect sense as the total e-commerce sales market is slated to reach over $357B in 2022. Of this total addressable market, searchers generate 30-60% of all e-commerce site revenue (SearchNode.com). That’s an extraordinary $107-214B that the total e-commerce search market generates annually.

With billions of dollars in play, why are search results so disappointing for consumers, marketers, and e-commerce sites? Poor e-commerce search leaves the full potential untapped due to an infinite number of product options and consumer preferences. Current search results are overwhelming, offer too many irrelevant options, and incumbent search technology cannot incorporate product information consumers actually care about.

Enter Ji Fang.

This Stanford Ph.D. knows a thing or two about being a frustrated consumer.

“A few years back, I was doing online research to book a hotel. I was so underwhelmed with my results from the search process that I no longer wanted to take the trip!” she muses.

Divinia was built from her passion for organizing and analyzing data to help other consumers find what they wanted online with greater accuracy, relevance, speed, and efficiency. Divinia’s NLP technology analyzes the increasingly vast amount of user-generated content. Its search results incorporate what consumers care about based on real consumer experiences hidden in user generated content.

Ji believed NLP could help travelers – and travel sites – do better. She started Divistay, the company’s hotel search engine, that allows search with natural language and query-specific details (‘pet-friendly hotels that are close to a lot of activities’) and returns only relevant results. By 2021, Divinia welcomed HIS as its first client to Divistay. Divinia’s advanced AI-driven algorithm is poised to better enable their online travel agency (OTA) site copolo.com to stand out.

“We understand the frustrations and limitations of search and have selected Divinia. We are confident their AI-driven technology will improve consumer’s experience and our conversion rate on our OTA significantly,” notes Hideo Hatana, President and CEO of HIS USA Holdings. For perspective, the online travel market is forecast to grow to $691B (USD) by 2026.

We are confident their AI-driven technology will improve consumer’s experience and our conversion rate on our OTA significantly

In addition to travel, Divinia has built five vertical and language agnostic products. Motley Fool, a leading provider of insights and analysis about stocks to help investors stay informed, recently joined as a Divinia client.

Divinia has also partnered with restaurant owners to showcase their positive customer review quotes on their websites. Unlike most social monitoring services focused on negative reviews, Divishow offers a more complete and unbiased understanding of past customer experiences for consumers and businesses.

Given the meteoric TAM associated with the e-commerce search market, Divinia sees endless possibilities for its growth. The company anticipates its next investor round in Q4 2022 and intends to leverage that infusion to scale its go-to market team and operations.